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That’s the latest cumulative tally as
Israel continues to rampage in the West Bank, furious over what it
calls the “kidnapping” of three Israeli Jewish teenage colonists
who went missing while hitchhiking several weeks ago. No one has
issued any messages claiming to have seized them, or issued any
demands. Israel vociferously asserts that Hamas kidnapped them,
which Hamas denies. [1]
The toll of dead and newly-imprisoned
Palestinians added to Israel’s permanent cache of thousands of
Palestinian prisoners (most of whom are never charged with a crime,
much less tried and convicted, which makes them state hostages) will
continue to grow, as Israel goes berserk over the three missing
Jewish teenage colonizers of the West Bank (“Judea and Samaria”
in official Israeli rhetoric); kicking down the doors to people’s
homes, ransacking them, breaking the stealing Palestinians’
possessions and carting off “suspects” without explanation,
leaving families terrorized and traumatized. (The condition Israel
has employed much violence over the years to put Palestinians in,
starting with the violent ethnic cleansing of 1948 as a key,
premeditated part of the much-lauded creation of the State of
Israel.)
In reaction to the disappearance of
their boys, Israel has already killed twice as many Palestinians
(teens and young men) as the number of Jewish teenaged colonists
whose disappearance it is avenging. And there will be more killed and
imprisoned. The moral perversion, not just in Israel but in those
nations that back it, is that the colonizers are the moral ones and
the colonized who resist their dispossession are the evil ones.
That’s not an endorsement of kidnapping or violence. Violence is
always ugly, and kidnapping is ruthless. So is demolishing tens of
thousands of people’s homes with bulldozers, uprooting their
orchards, imprisoning them to crush their political organizing,
shooting and beating demonstrators, and bombing refugee camps and
hospitals. If anything, the seizing of three Israeli colonizers,
tragic as it is for the kidnapped and their families, is a feeble
response to all the Palestinians, now imprisoned in their nascent
Bantustans, have endured for 66 years with no end in sight.
It seems to me that Israel’s violent
response makes it more likely that whoever presumably seized the 3
teenagers are now going to feel more pressure to kill them, if they
haven’t already, since they will fear being captured and Israel is
making it harder to move their prisoners around. Israel would have
been better off offering a reward for their safe return, or a
prisoner swap. But that would be “weak” and “only encourage
more kidnappings,” in the mindset of the tough guys who run the
Israeli state. Making the political point that Palestinian resistance
is intolerable is the Israelis’ imperative, and thus any act
by Palestinians contrary to Israeli demands, whether constructing a
home, a peaceful demonstration, lobbing a homemade rocket onto
Israeli soil, or seizing or killing Israeli Jews, will be met with
the mailed fist. Forcing the Palestinians to knuckle under, and
“proving” to them the futility of resistance, takes precedence
over the safe return of the 3 teens.
1] My guess is that if a
Palestinian political group did seize them, it would have been one of
the smaller, more extreme groups, not Hamas. Hamas has just entered
into a political unity government with the “Palestinian Authority”
run by Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas. They wouldn’t want to destabilize
it just weeks after its formation. Israel is using the boys’
disappearance as a wedge to try and pry apart the new unity between
the two main Palestinian factions to once again keep the Palestinians
divided and even weaker than they are. Once again Netanyahu is
issuing thunderous demands that Hamas be thrown out of the
Palestinian “government,” such as it is.
But it’s typical for Israel to blame
Hamas first. Israel always blames Hamas whenever some tiny
Palestinian sect lobs an explosive onto Israeli soil. So there’s a
pattern here.
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